Data Compression

The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more effective for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will boost every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.